"There
are times when I have to paint fast before the paint dries, encouraging the
colors to mix and blend. Other times I carefully and patiently fill in the
lines with thin glazes, creating patterns that move the eye playfully in and
out and over the surface of the canvas. Often I begin to bring the background
shapes into the foreground by outlining them in strong colors. The pale reflection
that should have remained in shadow suddenly floats boldly on the surface,
disturbing our visual expectations.

Throughout
this process I stand back every so often to check and see what the painting
requires next. I may stay with a single canvas for several days, or work on
two or three at a time. The closer I come to the finish, the more time I spend
looking and the less painting.

When
is the painting finished? Sometimes I know immediately when I stand back,
other times I hang it on a white wall and live with it for a week before I
know for sure. If it is not finished, something about it will make me uneasy-perhaps
the composition or balance of color, or a particular section that needs reworking.
When I like the painting more each time I see it, then I know it's done."

Aprofusion of color, free-flowing lines, geometric shapes,
directions, non-directions, organized chaos, beauty, emotion, design, confusion,
focus and understanding without knowing why - these are some of impressions
one gets when studying the ingenious work of Lynne Taetzsch. Her prismatic,
complex style mesmerizes a viewer and challenges one to make
sense out of that which is
not meant to. Lynne
Taetzsch has always been an artist. As a child growing up in New Jersey,
she sculpted play dough, made holiday decorations and played with all kinds
of craft projects. When she was old enough to get an allowance, she says, “I
spent it all on art supplies”. She loved to work with paint, chalk, paper
and brushes and she learned to, “achieve technical mastery of my tools.”
In her early teens, she began to study and draw the intricacies she observed
in nature.

She eventually began to draw and paint
portraits of her family members as well as self-portraits - which captured
her various up and down moods with sharp reality and stark colors.

Quietly depressed in her early teens, she
comments, “I moved into my wild stage. I rode a wave from mania to depression,
doing everything I could to stimulate the mania. Bored by high school, I quit
after my junior year and got my G.E.D. in the summer.”

In the fall she was enrolled in Rutgers
University in Newark and signed up for a drawing class where she learned to,
“loosen up and use the larger gesture of my whole arm, instead of the
tight strokes of cramped fingers.”
She gradually developed a looser style which she describes as, “much
more expressive in terms of color and form.”

She attended the University of Southern
California on a scholarship the following year and became interested in, ”...the
surface of paintings and the flat two-dimensionality, play of planes, intricacies
of texture and subtleties of tone." Her professor at USC asked, "Where
did you learn to paint like that?"

Feeling restricted with, “... too
many rules and the formality of USC,” Lynne applied to Cooper Union
art school in New York City, which she describes as, “ ... my kind of
place where sloppy t-shirts and jeans were the norm, and just about everyone
there was acting up or acting out.” She further elaborated on the lifestyle
there, saying, “We would take speed and drink coffee, talking each other
to death. We would build light and sound machines, projects we set on fire,
constructions to tickle the senses. We would wander around Washington Square,
sketching the men playing chess or sleeping on benches. We would spend days
walking uptown, checking out the galleries and museums." She said her
vision was changed forever by New York's abstract expressionists - Jackson
Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffman, Helen Frankenthaler, Fanz Kline,
Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko.

“At that time,” she recalls,
“ the popular notion of a serious artist was likely to be an alienated,
unshaven, drink-and-drug- driven rebel who trampled on tradition, howled at
the absurdity of life, and looked down contemptibly on middle-class values
and low-brow culture. I identified with this male icon of the beat generation,
and strove to excise myself from any identification with mainstream morality,
values, and institutions. I wore black, drove a motorcycle, and let the dust
balls accumulate in my pad." Her favorite colors to paint with at that
time were red and black, and she states, “No one would call my paintings
at that time decorative or pretty.”

Her artist skills were further developed
at Cooper Union, as she studied calligraphy, architectonics, one and two dimensional
design, life drawing, and painting.

Her painting teacher, Charles Side helped
her understand, “... what I was about and that I no longer needed art
school.” “In his class, I added collage materials to oil paint
and that process intensified my sense of composition, leading my art to its
non-objective stage.”

Lynne believes all art is abstract in the
sense that, ”...it moves away from reality to some degree.” Non-objective
art, she says, ”...however, does not begin with the world at all. It
has no reference point.”

Lynne says her life has taken a lot of
turns since her college days.
She moved back and forth from the east to the west coasts several times and
is now settled in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Her experience
has also been varied - she has worked as a secretary, a writer, an editor,
a publisher, a junior-high English and math teacher, a business trainer and
manager, a leather crafter, and a college professor. However, she always continued
her painting as she tried out various jobs along the way. She has been painting
full time in her studio in Ithaca, New York, since
2000.

Lynne Taetzsch

Lynne
eventually switched from oil paint to acrylics, which she found worked better
because they dry quickly. Her painting style involves working on a painting
over many days, adding layers that accumulate without totally eradicating
the previous layers. She notes, “The process or action of the painting
allows me to express my intentions through the motion of the brush or palette
knife." She compares her painting process to jazz, explaining, "The
heart of my art is improvisation.”

Lynne's
paintings are exhibited in solo, group, and juried exhibitions throughout
the United States.